SONG OF THE DAY: Chains and Things

This came off a “Wu Tang sampled this shit before” collection I took off a music blog somewhere or another. RZA’s mom’s record collection must’ve been dope as fuck, to be honest.

SONG OF THE DAY: I'm Glad You're Mine

One time I fell in false love with a woman because I woke up in her empty bed in the morning (we didn’t do anything) and she was blasting Al Green while frying potatoes. Al Green really makes me feel some kinda way.

SONG OF THE DAY: Get Thy Bearings (kudzu'd)

Bearings being gotten, on a daily basis, except I don’t go by the calendar, I go by seeing the moon in the sky. Much easier to get your bearings when you go about it looking up towards space (which also reflect inwardly, towards equal space). My crown’s been feeling a little extra stardusted lately… the beneficial effects of sitting my ass outside watching the lighting bugs create aura arrow doodads to better focus my visions of the future. Shout out to the lightning bugs, and the moon. Shout out to the future.

SONG OF THE DAY: Bills Be Gawn (kudzu'd)

Yesterday was payday, and more so than most paydays, I had more bills than paycheck. (Most of us know this feeling. It’s more common than not.) Today, my bills do not be gone, but my paycheck is. I don’t think people randomly end up on internet sites anymore, mostly just scrolling social media for a simplified corn feed of actual information, but in the off chance anyone is, and you have discretionary income, consider buying a railroad haiku spike at my online shop my online shop. Or a book. Prices are always cheaper direct to me with cashapp or venmo too.

SONG OF THE DAY: Surreal

The wonderful thing about music on Earth is it’s so vast, you can’t possibly know it all. There’s always amazing shit out there to find out about. I never really consciously knew about João Donato, the Brazilian multi-instrumentalist. I’m guessing that despite that, I’d heard him on songs before, being he played with so many jazz heavyweights, like Cal Tjader, Mongo Santamria, and others. But he has a vast discography from Brazil, and for whatever reason, I downloaded this album he made with his son, Donatinho. Actually, I’m pretty confident the reason I downloaded it was because I saw it on a music blog (I’m one of the 19 people that still goes to those) with this album cover, which might be the most amazing father/son art I’ve ever seen. I DREAM of being the kind of father where my children would think art like this portrays our relationship. It was a surprise banger on my old iphone 5s working as an ipod in the past year, as I’ve gotten more and more into synthesized funk chaos to combat the AI cybertron battles with (as a soundtrack). “Surreal” is probably my favorite track. And apparently, it exists on a 45 from Japan, but I haven’t found an affordable copy as of yet. But one day, I will.
Sadly Donato passed away last summer, at the well-earned age of 88. That also means he was in his early 80s when he made this album with his son, which is also something to aspire to as a human being. We need less weird 80-something billionaires who want to control presidents to stifle current generations, and more weird 80-something kooks making space funk for future generations. That’s just textbook Futurism 101.

SONG OF THE DAY: Keep It Moving

At some point this was something I wrote on this very blog. And then Boogie Brown used text to voice to make it into words that he dropped behind this Southern Gothicc Futurism Appalachian Boom Bap beat he made. And that came out on a Blue Globe Beats release, which I played this track a lot in the car, so it reappears on the blog as a song of the day. On one hand, it could be called “meta” if you think of it in digital terms. But it’s also just regeneration of thought seeds, with some pieces dominant and others recessive, and a re-creation of creative genetics. Nothing is original, and you can’t own art, even if it comes from your own mind. You can’t own anything. I mean, we tell ourselves otherwise, but we’re lying like a mufucka most of the time. Yes, to ourselves. But you already know that most likely.

SONG OF THE DAY: For Those Who Love to Groove (kudzu'd)

Posting slowed down song videos to youtube has been an interesting foray over the past few years, especially as I snag mp4s to use for the videos. I learned a long time ago that you can’t use actual videos for actual songs that have been slowed down, because there’s dueling copyrights between the song owner and the video owner, and youtube just shuts it down completely because they don’t know who to direct your views to. So I tend to try and find performances of songs rather than the “official” videos to use.
Some of the old Sonido Dueñez rips that I made videos for have been illuminating, because youtube reveals to me what the actual song originally was, because Dueñez’s mixtapes were notorious for not having the actual song title written on them. But some of those sneak through and I guess nobody owns the U.S. copyright or some shit, and I don’t even get a copyright notice where any profiteering acquired from the data accumulate while you watch the videos I made can be sent. So it goes to me (adding to my lifetime youtube earnings of $0, lol).
I had one especially great song I ripped and made a video for, Karthago’s “I Give You Everything You Want”, which was a 45 reissued by Fraternity Music Group in 2016, but copyright owners wouldn’t let the song live on youtube, regardless of speed or video added.
Anyways, all this is to say there’s a lot of weird behind the scenes data analysis going on, and sometimes I have to make 2 or 3 videos before one actually clears youtube. But in the process of slowing down this amazingly funky song by Ray Parker Jr. & Raydio (his band from before the “Ghostbusters” era), I got the normal copyright notice where someone else was taking the profits off it. Except it wasn’t Ray Parker Jr. & Raydio. Somehow, some rapper/producer from Texas named Six2 basically took this old “For Those Who Love to Groove” synth funk, and claimed it as his own beat, and had some woman throw a hook over it, while he raps. Not trying to hate on nobody’s art, because normally I wouldn’t, but his song ain’t all that to where he needs to be claiming the copyright of me slowing down the old Ray Parker Jr. jam. But he did, which tells me he ain’t my kinda people. Out here playing lawyerball and calling it art. The release the song that claims it’s this comes from also features a couple of features from Big Mike of the Geto Boys and Timbaland, so maybe Six2 had financial backing and was throwing money at features and actually cleared the entire rights to the instrumental. I don’t know. I do know when I spin that motherfucker live, slowed down, next week while DJing, can’t nobody say shit to me in real life. And art is more for real life benefit than filing legal paperwork and attempting in vain to stack some coins like Scrooge McDuck.

SONG OF THE DAY: Ain't No Grave Gonna Hold My Body Down

This is such a wonderful song (even if this is a cover version). It seems too simple that it got co-opted for zombie movie/show soundtracks, but that also just goes to show how entertainment lacks nuance and doesn’t really see beyond the one line of the song. Anyways, a clean copy of Brother Claude Ely’s original 45 of this is probably the highest of high on my holy grail list of 45s I hope to come across some day. But I tend to get any cover of it I can find that’s at least 20 years old. (New ironic religion lacks the holy ghost spirit.)

SONG OF THE DAY: Play At Your Own Risk

The history of racism in America affected the segregation of musical genres, which is a shame. It would’ve been nice, in retrospect, to have music jump those borders more easily. A great example of this for me lately is Planet Patrol’s “At Your Own Risk”, which was made of extra tracks not used in Afrika Bambaataa’s “Planet Rock”, so has a similarity to it, like an alternate third jersey version of Planet Rock almost. But there was a time in my life, when I had just gotten my license, and on Saturdays the liquor store in Farmville would close at noon, but the one in Drakes Branch was open ‘til 6. And my dad would get his weekend’s liquor supply Thursday after work in Farmville, because that was payday for him, and the liquor store was usually the first stop. But generally speaking, folks would show up on Friday night to play cards at our trailer, and bottles would get passed, and if anything was left at the end of a long Friday night, it wasn’t gonna go long on Saturday afternoon. So we’d drive to Drakes Branch to hit the liquor store, so he pops could restock for the impending long Saturday night (which would basically be a repeat of the previous night most times, with most of the same characters). If it was football season, he might even have to double up on the Saturday run to make sure Sunday afternoon was covered for the Redskins game.
In retrospect, that drive from our trailer in southern Prince Edward County, to Keysville, then turn by the abandoned factory on 59 to get to Drakes Branch, turning left onto Main Street of a town that was already dying even then, that close to Reagan’s politics of doom that turned the doomed into The Doomed, “At Your Own Risk” would’ve been the perfect soundtrack. And it’s a long enough song it could’ve ate up most of that 10 mile or so stretch on 59. I do recognize and appreciate my dad’s constant wishful thinking back then, that one bottle liquor on a Thursday evening was actually gonna be enough to last the whole weekend. Too bad he never got the help to get closer to making that equation actually work out. That too is the byproduct of all our segregation and division, where we get fractured into our little silos of self-destruction and think we’re out here going through something entirely on our own, when in actuality in that 10 miles we just drove down the road, even out in the middle of nowhere, we just passed 50 motherfuckers going through the exact same shit.

SONG OF THE DAY: Nous Savon Stout (kudzu'd)

One time a friend of mine stole a spaceship in high school, and had it hidden down a logging trail near where we lived. Getting in was really cool, because you realize you’re climbing into a spaceship, and also we were really high, plus had like two cases of Miller Genuine Draft with us, which is what we drank back then. But I remember the windshield being really hard to see out of, like it had a fucked up angle, and I guess whatever radar screens a normal spaceship uses to see ahead of itself was broken in this one, so we couldn’t really drive it in the daytime, because then somebody would’ve seen us, but we couldn’t really drive it at night either, unless we went super slow, because we couldn’t see shit. Luckily, there’s not a lot in the sky, but even then, a couple bowls too far into 1990s homegrown and more than a handful of empty MGD bottles clanking around on the ground, it wasn’t as fun as I would’ve expected. Plus we couldn’t figure out how to work the stereo, like in retrospect I think it had some sort of aux cord we haven’t gotten to yet, but back then we were just like, “How the fuck do we put a CD or tape into this thing?” I think the second time we went out, I took a little boombox with, but for whatever reason batteries die faster in the sky once you get outside the atmosphere. Shit never works out like you hope.

SONG OF THE DAY: A&W

I listen to newer music, too, especially when I think it's love songs to root beer.

SONG OF THE DAY: Get Thy Bearings

Sometimes I dream about releasing bootleg 45s of things that absolutely should’ve been issued on 45 at some point but never were. I’ve got a cover version of this by The Sand Dollars on 45 that’s pretty great, but the OG is the OG. How did Donovan have a beat like this in 1968?

SONG OF THE DAY: I'm In The Mood

I used to have a knockin’ boots situationship with a woman who always dimmed the lights down low and played old blues music, like every time. It actually was nice and created quite the vibe, plus her bed was small, like an old school twin bed which is great because you gotta get serious, no room to escape and dilly dally. Because of this cellular memory in my physical body though (with serotonin exclamation marks), when I hear certain old blues music, it gets me all riled up. And of course it does, because just look at this song. That was sexy ass music, designed (by divine minds not actually purposefully designing too hard with the brain) to make one inclined to do just what we was doing while we was listening to it.

SONG OF THE DAY: What A Funky Night

Love bumping shit like this as western civilization falls apart (as it should).

SONG OF THE DAY: I've Never Found a Girl

Cultural mainstream is still pretty strong, even in these faux quirky digital times. Folks like to think we have access to everything and know about more stuff that ever, but the algorithm is still driven by pre-conceived biases, and so much shit exists outside the mainstream. There's all these non-mainstream living legends who exist, and do their thing to a big successful scale, and it's integral to certain scenes, but the mainstream still has no clue. Sunny Ozuna is an example. Dude has been making the brown-eyed soul bangers for decades, probably most famously with Sunny & The Sunliners (or Sunny y Los Sunliners, depending on your heritage). A lot of his classics have been reissued through some modern souldie labels, but Sunny himself is still out here, at age 80, playing big Chicano car shows and regional festivals, and pretty much still a staple wherever there's a large Mexican-American population.
It's summertime cookout season, and I remember being at the neighbor's cookouts back growing up, blessed to have experienced a non-white majority environment at an early age (to learn humility and how to shut the fuck up and get along better), and I think about this cultural mainstream vs non-mainstream norms with cookout season, because Frankie Beverly & Maze feels like cookout music to me. Just hearing certain Maze songs just bring those vibes, completely, like I can imagine the potato salad and barbecue chicken in front of me lol. But the mainstream (meaning, white culture) doesn't even know about that shit. Even in all the genres that the mainstream has Christopher Columbused over the decades, certain things like Maze or Sunny seem to somehow still escape the nets.
Anyways, Sunny is a classic, and for the most part, I've ended more DJ sets I've had than not with the 45 of Sunny & The Sunglows "Smile Now Cry Later" played at 33. It's my "turn out the lights, the party's over" song. This ain't that song, but it's still a banger. Sunny's got a deep discography of them.

SONG OF THE DAY: Summer (kudzu'd)

Summertime means slow down. Any time means slow down. Time needs to slow down. Time is a social construct. Slow down and live longer. On one hand, I may be older than I once was. But on the other, fuck it, I like this side of the dirt better. I think I’ll stomp around on it a little longer.

SONG OF THE DAY: Two of Hearts (12" version)

It apparently is 12 inch version week here at the old blog nobody reads that still writes about music as if people still download mp3s and want music recommendations and don’t just let spotify suggested playlists pour music down their throat. This song is great though, and me pushing these wonderful disco beats on you has nothing to do with Pride month. I like shit like this year round. I’m comfortable with that.

SONG OF THE DAY: Ring My Bell (12" version)

This is one of my favorite 45s to play slow… the beat just gets so thick and crazy. Then I started bumping this download of the long ass 12-inch disco version, where the crazy beat just gets all the room it needs to stretch its legs and flail its arms. True break beat shit. And a few months ago, that reminded me that during the late disco/early hip hop era, a lot of stuff got released on 12-inch records at 45 speed for singles. Including this. So I copped a nice little stack of 45 rpm 12-inch singles, and been meaning to make a new DJ Honeysuckle Vines mix with them, most likely coming out the gate with this as the opening track. And it’s an 8 minute 10 second song, that slowed down will be like nearly 12 minutes. I know that’s a “simple” calculation if you’re a white guy who loves ska music and keeps your shirt tucked in all the time, but I’m not like that so my brain can’t just calculate that shit all willy nilly; I have to let the beat ride and see where it goes. And whether I make that 12-inch mix later tonight, or later this week, or four years from now, I will let this fuckin’ “Ring My Bell” beat ride as long as it wants. In fact, maybe I need a second 12-inch copy and just juggle this beat for the whole 2 hour mixtape. Fuck it.